Rubbers & Slingshots

One of the very first things you see when you start a new table is the layout. You will notice these iconic objects.

At the very center end of the table lies a drain, to the left and right of the drain, the flippers. These flippers will be the player's primary form of direct control over the pinball. Next to these flippers are their respective lanes. Depending on how you shoot the pinball and how it will return the the bottom end of the field these lanes may spell out life or death for your current ball! If the ball lands in the lane, your reflexes have a chance to return the ball back into the play field. But should it land in the outside lane then your ball is doomed to the drain!

As you can see there are the left inner/outer lanes and right inner/outer lanes

As you will notice, above the lanes are two slingshots these are two objects surrounded by rubbers that will repel the ball away when hit. 

I thought to myself that it would be rather useful to learn how to make a slingshot. So, I began to take it apart. The default slingshot is comprised of a rubber, a surface and approximately 4 or 5 pegs. In fact when making a rubber,you don't need to insert the pegs for any other reason besides blue-print/engineering purposes. In other-words, where your pegs are in your slingshot do not effect how it acts. At least, not in this program.

In order to create a slingshot, first select rubbers and then select "shape-able" Future Pinball will produce the following item below.

The number circles represent points that can be moved in order to create the desired shape. I will be creating a regular slingshot like the ones depicted above. You will notice that these points can be deleted as well as inserted into the shape-able rubber by selecting the points and right-clicking and selecting "insert new shape point" or by selecting "delete" to delete it. I have chosen to create a shape and then delete the extra points.

Here is an example.

After we have the desired shape, all you have to do is right click the point where you want the launching mechanism to be placed and select "Special attribute" and "slingshot".

This will create a launching mechanism that will propel the rubber in a desired direction and thus launch the ball in that direction as well. Notice the purple line that now surrounds the entire rubber shape. This indicates what the shape will transform into when it is engaged thus propelling the ball away in those directions.

After that you can add pegs and surfaces for decoration!

I will talk about pegs and surfaces in another post, but for now, here is my finished product!

One slingshot ready to bash pinballs back!

Start!

Hello out there!

My name is Eric Chham and I am a Sophomore at the University of Washington. I've been studying a lot of things, Math, Sciences, English, German and Music. But I've never learned much about something I've done almost every single day of my life since I turned ten years old. I've never taken the time to think about games. Video games, board games, card games, and arcade games. Most notably, pinball. The first game I ever played was virtual pinball on my aunt's computer back in the late 1990's. It came default on her windows brand new top-of-the-line Personal Computer. Every other game came on a floppy disk.

And so now, here I am twenty years later. Discovering virtual pinball again, I found a nifty free software called "Future Pinball" created by Christopher Leathley. It is a full 3D pinball simulator with physics! Unlike other free software, it seems as though Future Pinball doesn't have a lot of documentation. Instead of just waiting for someone else to document their discoveries of this program I decided to figure it out for myself. I will post what I find here so that anyone wishing to learn of this awesome program's many features can find some ideas! Like I'm trying to do for myself!

Thanks for reading!

-Eric